The University of Colorado graduate has written historical novels, including “Queen of America” and “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.” He has penned acclaimed poetry, a nonfiction account of Mexican immigrants called “The Devil’s Highway,” a memoir and a short-story collection.

All this has garnered him enough literary honors to collapse the average fireplace mantel, including an Edgar Award for best mystery story.

Thursday he will be in Denver to pick up another honor: Urrea is the 2012 recipient of the Evil Companions Award, given each year to an author who lives in or writes about the American West.

“It’s kind of freaking me out,” Urrea said in a phone interview made while driving through Iowa. (For the record, his wife was at the wheel.) “I’m working on the speech. I don’t know what I’m going to say yet.”

As an Evil Companion honoree, Urrea is in good company. Previous winners in the award’s 20-year history include Richard Ford, Annie Proulx, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and Colorado’s own Pam Houston and Kent Haruf.

Urrea, 56, has a rollicking sense of humor, which promises good things for audiences when he’s at the dais.

That could be tied to a childhood that exposed him to life’s vagaries and absurdities. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to an American mom and Mexican dad, he grew up in San Diego in a bicultural neighborhood.

“We were in semi-dire straits,” Urrea recalled. “I had really unhappy parents. It was kind of a dark period.”

His dad, a janitor, was a perfectionist about Spanish grammar and intonation. But his main obsession was that Urrea grow up “macho,” which made the glammed-out David Bowie posters in his son’s bedroom problematic. “The Jimi Hendrix poster was bad enough, and when he saw Bowie. …”

But Urrea’s mom read to him as a child. It proved huge.

“At first she read me Dickens, and at first I had no idea what she was talking about,” Urrea said with a laugh. “Then she read me ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and it blew my mind. I was just enraptured.”

Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” was also a favorite.

“I was an imaginative kid, and that helped me,” Urrea said. “I spent a lot of time inside my own head. The oleander bush was my jungle, and the dirt alley behind our apartment was the Mississippi.”

During his teens, he also spent time south of the border with his Mexican cousins.

“Being raised biculturally was tremendously beneficial,” Urrea said. “And all the things that were negative growing up, like when you found out you were a ‘greaser,’ were eventually incorporated into my work. It was very liberating.”

As much as anyone writing in American letters, Urrea traverses genres.

“I love them all,” he said. “They’re all aspects of the writing life. But while I love crafting fiction, poetry is the mother root.” (He won a Colorado Book Award in poetry for “The Fever of Being.”)

He has become a big fan of Asian poetry, including Korean poet Ko Un. He’s especially fond of haiku. The Zen groundedness is the appeal, he said, the attention to a cricket’s chirp or a leaf’s falling.

“The things that seem truest to me are the things that seem purest to me,” Urrea said.

Early on, his heroes in prose included Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Richard Brautigan. Later he discovered Tom McGuane and Ed Abbey. “These were game-changers for me,” he said.

Urrea is a graduate of the University of San Diego. He did his graduate work at the University of Colorado, and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

The worth of such programs has been debated. Author Flannery O’Connor was once asked if she thought universities stifled writers. Her famous reply: “In my opinion they don’t stifle enough of them.”

While Urrea teaches his students craft, he also tries to impart an approach to craft. “It’s about the way of life and the cleanliness of approach,” he said. “It’s about the complete surrender to this thing.

“For a while I think I was viewed as a crackpot, but writing is about what you are, not what you do,” he said. “I’d rather teach in an Oregon forest, looking for deer, but that’s hard in downtown Chicago.

“I tell my students, ‘You’re not coming to me for fame or even a career, but you are getting a black belt in writing.”

While teaching pays the bulk of the bills, Urrea is at heart a writer. He recently finished a book of poetry. Two novels are underway.

“One’s a really horrific dark novel that I think will have some of my fans dying of strokes,” he said. “The other is about Red Cross nurses in World War II. It’s kind of an epic, and other fans will go, ‘Where are the Mexicans?’ “

Again, a burst of laughter. Then Urrea turned serious, his voice as flat as the landscape he was traveling through.

“I think all artists are outlaws,” he said. “We have to transgress our own families. We have to tell their secrets. We no longer sit around campfires talking about our dreams. As writers, we go out into the darkness and tell people what we find there.”

Restaurant critic William Porter is a feature writer at The Denver Post, where he covers food, culture and people. He joined the news outlet in 1997. Before that, he spent 14 years covering politics and popular culture at The Phoenix Gazette and Arizona Republic. He is a native of North Carolina.

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